California Coast & Ocean

This is a really strange moment. The economy is on the brink of collapse, yet there's an intoxicating sense of boundless opportunities. Can this be real?

The crumbling of the crazy mortgage pyramid scheme just before the election of Barack Obama opened the way for our country to get off a self-destructive course and begin to shape an economy based on living within our means, with respect for human dignity and nature's life-support system. When the stock market took its dive and didn't surface for air, we all saw sand where a firm foundation was needed. Now we have to build one and the money will apparently be provided.

With economists urging the White House to spend, spend a lot, and spend fast to avert another Great Depression, the new President might be able to speed up delivery of his campaign promises. It's time to work out the particulars, and everything depends on how that is done. Will the billions of dollars go to support good work already under way, or will most of it be doled out to large corporations created for profit rather than public benefit?

Projects to support and emulate abound throughout the country, and especially in California. While Washington refused to acknowledge climate change, governors, mayors, and citizens' organizations took the initiative. Solar and water-saving improvements were installed in Long Beach, Los Angeles, Orange County, Richmond, San Francisco, and elsewhere, creating new jobs in the process. The Coastal Conservancy put together collaborative projects that protect natural resources and prepare for sea level rise while also providing work and other economic benefits.

New socially conscious alternative energy enterprises sprang up, and now they hope that government will level the playing field so they can compete with fossil fuel industries, and offer support. The production tax credit is not much use when everyone is suffering losses. They hope that the new Congress will provide an investment tax credit, "so that if you put money into a wind plant, for instance, you get a tax refund," said Charles Newcomb, chief technology officer at NexGen Energy Partners, LLC (NexGen), a small investor-owned company that deals in distributive commercial-scale wind power and other natural energy systems.

This is the kind of company that can help businesses and communities to move to green power by making it affordable. It offers a "turn-key approach" that spares the energy buyer the costs of ownership. NexGen develops a system to suit the customer's needs, installs it on site, operates and maintains it, expecting to recoup its investment during the life of the contract, 10 to 20 years. The systems are of a scale suitable for industrial plants, shopping centers, schools, wastewater treatment facilities, and other facilities of comparable size.

"Once you've got the hardware, this is one of the fastest shots in the arm to local economies," Newcomb said. There are no fuel costs with wind, and on-site systems do not require long transmission lines, as big wind farms do. Financial benefits stay local.

In a hot new book, The Green Collar Economy, Van Jones, founder and president of Green for All, an Oakland-based organization, points out that solutions to social problems are inseparable from solutions to environmental problems. How that principle works in practice can be seen in Richmond, a city on San Francisco Bay that has a major Chevron oil refinery, high crime, and too few jobs--and a solar energy initiative supported by Mayor Gayle McLaughlin. Jones quotes Michele McGeoy, founder of Solar Richmond, the coordinating organization: "Solar is one antidote to pollution, and jobs are one antidote to violence." Jones gives other examples, many of them outgrowths of community organizing. It might as well be a book written for the new President.

We have been in a dreadful slough of despond, but now we're up. It's one of those transformative moments that arise in American history. I was a reporter for the Washington Post when Kennedy stood in the blowing snow in front of the White House on January 20, 1961, and called on our better nature: "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." We had been waiting to be asked! Young Americans flocked into the Peace Corps that Kennedy created and their lives were changed by what they learned.

I was also at the March for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King's voice rang across the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial: "I have a dream. . . ." My eyes were drawn to the quiet presence of a group of young people in blue overalls and crisp white shirts, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who were already working for justice in the South. We were more than ready.

The words of these two great leaders, who appeared as though created by the country's need, are indelibly recorded in my mind, as are the words of Barack Obama on the night of November 4, 2008, in Chicago's Grant Park: "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible . . . who still questions the power of democracy, tonight is your answer."

A dear niece and her friends of the cell phone generation were in that vast crowd, jubilant because each had experienced the power of the vote. "Yes we can!" It was a call and response, it was the next verse to "We Shall Overcome." Many of us cried with relief and danced with joy. Democracy is still breathing. Now it's time to nurse the country back to health, and there's a lot of good work for each of us to do.